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Charles Manson
Charles Manson Childhood Born as no name Maddox Manson was born to unmarried, 16-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, in Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period after her son's birth Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. Charles Manson's biological father appears to have been a "Colonel Scott", against whom Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, the boy never really knew him. According to Manson, his mother, alleged to be an alcoholic, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia. Upon his mother's 1942 parole, she retrieved Manson and lived with him in run-down hotel rooms. He would one day characterize her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole happy childhood memory. In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After 10 months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him. First Offense By burglarizing a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room.7 A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy's uncle.13Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age 13, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise.12 After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.13In Utah, having burglarized gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and an average I.Q. of 109 (later tested at 121),13 he was illiterate. "He was, the caseworker concluded, aggressively antisocial."13 First Imprisonment Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist's recommendation, Manson "took a razor blade and held it against another boy's throat while he sodomized him." He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered "dangerous." In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole. After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married a hospital waitress named Rosalie Jean Willis. By his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness with her, and he was able to support their marriage via small-time jobs and auto theft. Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle interstate; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years' probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California. Rosalie gave birth to their son, Charles Manson Jr., while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson tried to escape by stealing a car. He was subsequently given five years probation, and his parole was denied. Second Imprisonment Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a 16-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a 10-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution made a "tearful plea" before the court that she and Manson were "deeply in love... and would marry if Charlie were freed." The woman, whose name was Leona and who, as a prostitute, had used the name Candy Stevens, did, in fact, marry Manson before the year’s end, possibly so testimony against him would not be required of her. After Manson took Leona and another woman from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year's end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed. Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of the women was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his 10-year sentence. In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island. Although the Mann Act charge had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a "tremendous drive to call attention to himself," an observation echoed in September 1964. In the interval, in 1963, Leona was granted a divorce, in the pursuit of which she alleged that she and Manson had had a son, Charles Luther.